Earlier today, I published “Dewhurst’s Downhill Slide.” Travis Considine, a Dewhurst adviser, has disagreements with aspects of the piece.

Specifically, he says several passages about Dewhurst’s parliamentary decisions miss what happened during the state-senate debate.

Here’s his response:

The order to clear the gallery was given by Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst in the final minutes before midnight because it wasn’t until then that the gallery erupted, as a result of the third “point of order” against state senator Wendy Davis being sustained. The only way to take the floor away from a filibustering senator is to sustain three points of order, which Dewhurst achieved after more than eleven hours of work. The Capitol had an unprecedented number of visitors that night which crowded the hallways in such a manner that the Department of Public Safety (DPS) could only remove gallery spectators one side at a time into a very crowded hallway. Removing 500 individuals from the gallery takes up to an hour under normal situations. Some of the protesters resisted or very slowly departed the gallery. The second complicating factor is that DPS had audibly heard another senator, who was presiding during the appeal, warn the gallery to be quiet or they would be removed. Upon hearing this, the DPS officers in the gallery temporarily stopped removing people of their own accord without a direct order to stop clearing the gallery.